Books vs. Blogs: Rust Belt Blogs and Midwestern Literary Theory

If you were to divide the United States into fifths, the Rust Belt (East North Central) would lie in the second fifth, a lopsided trident composed of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. As the middle America’s northeastern border, this region retains some topographical characteristics common in the mid-atlantic states- faintly rolling hills, deep valleys, canyons, exposed bedrock, thick oak and maple forests. Too, it has the sprawling, flat fields (here corn and soy) that gave the Midwest its “breadbasket” title. And culturally? Given its inclusion in the midwest, I compared the diction, syntax, and content of Rust Belt blogs to those characteristic of midwestern literature.

I started with the aggregate Rust Belt analysis.
According to Barbara Allen, common topics in midwestern literature are agricultural life, weather, the town, its people, shops and shopowners, and daily small town life (Sense of Place, 29). David Pichaske echoes Allen, and adds what he calls “the pillars of midwestern life: a bountiful dinner table, familial love, occasional monitary reward, and the Word of God” (Rooted, 97). The loss of time is also a big theme, and can result in “nostalgic memories, exodus, and collapsed chronology” (99). Midwesterners are always grappling with home-leaving, returning, leaving again. Home represents the “Edenic past,” the “garden myth,” while away signifies progress, future in its “distant towers of refinement and culture” (Weber, Ronald, The Midwestern Ascendency in American Writing 24). Some of the bloggers speak with mitigated fondness for their hometowns; most of the Ohioans and the Illinoisan have unbrindled hometown pride. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana, the bloggers have struggled with leaving their hometowns- two of them have left; the other two leave sporadically.

The weather is certainly a heavy hitter in ENC blogs, and as in midwestern literature, it is often used to introduce a story (Pichaske, 44). None of the bloggers I read were farmers, or worked on farms- as its moniker indicates, the Rust Belt has, in the past century, gone from being almost entirely agricultural and rural to being industrial, commercial, and urban. Perhaps because much of industry is machine-based, steady, and predictable (or was until two years ago),  bloggers rarely discuss their careers.  As for religion, one of the bloggers was a somewhat lapsed Jew, and some of the others were Christian, but only one mentioned this, and the charity she performed in its name, with any regularity. The town and all its parts though, form the backbones of some of the blogs, and played important roles in all but one of the others. There are many restaurant reviews, which tend to prioritize decor, and service, and the backgrounds of their owners over the taste and presentation of the food. Festivals are very popular subjects, as were local sports games and blogging community meet-ups. Missing are the “credible accounts of the incredible”- instead we get credible accounts of the credible (Allen, 30).

The midwestern voice, as per Allen and Pichaske, is fairly laconic, straightforward, unpretentious, awkward, bashful, meaning-driven, wry, understated, and entirely lacking in melodrama. Most of this applies to the ENC blogs, save for bashful and understated. Some of the ENC bloggers were tentative, bracketing their statements with thought modifiers and adverbial qualifiers. Others were more declarative, using assertions backed up by further assertions or by visual or anecdotal details. Most of them had a penchant for hyperbole couched in simple, undramatic language. Pichaske writes of the midwesterner’s skepticism towards theories and his preference of experience-based knowledge, and this comes out through the dominance of the narrator, his thoughts, assessments, and illustrative personal anecdotes.

Midwestern writing favors short phrases that sometimes trail off for effect. ENC bloggers use simple sentences and two-part complex compounds, where the first part is an adverbial qualifier and the second is a (usually) independent statement. Static sentences, or stand-alone assertions, are common in both books and blogs, though, as previously noted, many of the assertions are substantiated.
Pacing-wise, midwestern literature is jumpy stuff, full of “syntactical leaps and idiosyncratic phrasing” (Pichaske, 45), and the same can be said for the blogs. Transitions, in particular, tend to be either discontinuous or bumpy.
Descriptions are place-centric, be it town or country, and they are rendered specific through brands, trade names, streets, as well as earth, land, and home imagery. The ENC bloggers love their brand and trade names, and their town destinations, and they frequently bring up the weather, but only in Michigan and Wisconsin is the land itself discussed at any length.
Midwestern speech peppers colloquial and retro-sounding phrases amidst common american english, and the ENC bloggers do the same, along with aimspeak- lol-type abbreviations and cutesy mashups, truncations, and mispellings.

In addition to the aggregate characteristics, I also revisited two blogs that I felt occupied opposite ends of the quality spectrum- one educated, polished, and generous, the other ridden with grammatical errors, narrative jumps, voice switches, and sparse imagery. The authors of Rhiannon Revolts (WI) and It’s All About Me! Deal With It! (OH) are of similar age and (from what I can gather) economic background, but one is a grad student at ??, with abroad experience and a degree in American Studies from Smith, while the other toils at what sounds like an hourly wage job in the same area, if not town, she grew up in. Below are my individual analysis:

Rhiannon Revolts (WI)- Very sharp, at times knowingly querelous, and prone to undramatic exaggerations and generalizations. All statements are bracketed by thoughts and personal tie-ins, and the writing is intelligent, even bookish, without being didactic or weighty or pompous. Posts waver between memoir and in-depth book review- they are precise, thoughtful, full of grounding details (brand names, restaurants, authors), and very anecdotal.

MIdwestern traits displayed:

• importance of weather, and using it as an introduction
• earth, land, and home imagery
• brands, categories, signs, particular place details- restaurants, local speciality foods, events
• importance of family- lives with her mother; her brother is close by
• unique midwest stops and starts, syntactical leaps, idiosyncratic phrasing (asides, post-posted clarifiers, random SHOUTED COLLOQUIALISMS, ellipses, dependent+dependent+colon+voc+command, fronted conjunctions and transitionals)
• colloquial phrases (some antiquated, some anglo, some midwest) set amongst common english
• uncolored by melodrama or tragedy
• pragmatic
• self-reflexive, oral poetics, collage pastiche, neorealism (those grounding, specific details and the heavy presence of the author)
• unpretentious plainspeak

Blatantly not there:
religion, bashfulness, rough language, content trumping style, landscape as a release from/protection against the anxieties of civilization

It’s All About Me! Deal With It! (OH)
First off, this is not educated writing- unintentional fragments and spelling errors abound, and the transitions between ideas are very choppy. The general second is used, often in assertions. First person assertions, or static sentences, are very common, and are backed up with further assertions, but few illustrations. For the most part sentences are sparsely adorned, and the majority are complex compound (adverbial/transitional/conjunction intro+independent/dependent). The language is a mixture of plain american english, cutesy aimspeak, and antique phrases. The voice comes off as quite very young, owing to the simplicity of the structure and (sometimes content) of the sentences, the flat declarations, and the exclamations, but some topics are certainly more adult (domestic abuse, drug use, and sex), so the overall impression is of a culturally and financially impoverished, stunted teen’s diary.

Midwestern traits displayed:

• plain, awkward (lexically and syntactically)
• uncolored by melodrama or tragedy
• shear things off, a minimum of words arranged for a maximum effect (all those flat declarations can actually work to her advantage)
• weather factors into posts
• some idiosyncratic phrasing (conjunction intros, vague subjects, “I have but $ for the garnishment, post-posed affirming queries, ellipses)
• unpretentious plainspeak
• definitely a motherload of realism, rough rather than elegant, and very pragmatic.
• some neorealism as well, especially as relating to physical appearence
• colloquial and aimspeak snuggled amongst common (if shoddy) american english

blatantly not there:
bashfulness, religion, oral poetics, collage pastiche, landscape details

So…what, then? For the most part, the Rust Belt blogs line up rather neatly over the midwestern characteristics, and while the two blogs above are not, in terms of much of the subject matter and writing quality, alike, they do share many of the core midwestern characteristics, in particular the usuage of colloquial phrasings, the jumpy transitions, weather as background and plot construct, the unpretentious, straightforward plainspeak, and the importance of rooting names, places, and signs. As this is the first group I’ve done, though, I can’t yet call it a rhetorically distinct region- that pronouncement awaits further analysis.

Books:

Least Heat Moon, William. PrairyErth (A Deep Map)
Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey.

Pichaske, David. Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place.

Allen, Barbara. Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures.

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